Provenance:

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner’s aunt, Toronto.

Literature:

William Kurelek, Lumberjack, Montreal, 1974, plate 3, illustrated n colour.
Patricia Morley, Kurelek, A Biography, Toronto, 1986, pages 52-54 for an account and photographs of the artist’s lumberjack life.

Note:

The life of a Canadian lumberjack was unique, a way of living where a man was measured by what he could do and not by who he was.

In the forward to Lumberjack, Kurelek writes that the first time went into the bush was when he was 19 years old: “I did it to prove to my father (and myself) that I could make it on my own. Like many immigrants, my father had worked in the bush when he first came to this country. And like many fathers, he did not believe that a son could take the hardships he had endured.”

Morley writes that Kurelek’s becoming a lumberjack was his “first exposure to Canada’s wilderness, to the variety and vastness of a land he would later record in paint with living fidelity...In later years he realized just how rich had been his exposure to traditional lumberjack life... ‘As a painter, I felt very lucky to have experienced traditional lumber camp living before it disappeared forever.’ His lumberjack paintings record the old ways, along with the depth of feeling they had evoked in him.”

This painting depicts a party of lumberjacks returning to camp while a black bear and her two cubs watch their progress to the cook shack. Kurelek writes that part of the cook’s area was the meat shack where whole sides of cured beef and pork were hung up. “The door had to be well fastened against bears who rummaged in the garbage heap a few yards off.”

Kurelek’s major work, The Lumberjack’s Breakfast, which was used as the cover to his book Lumberjack, was sold by Joyner’s in the May 2002 auction and was featured on the cover the auction catalogue.